How many of you have committed code on your first day of work? As you might know, it’s not a common practice. In fact, when you do commit code to production on your first day of work, you’re a bit of a hero! Why is it so hard to make a meaningful impact during your first day of work?

The irony here is that Developers are increasingly expensive: the average Developer Salary in California as of May 2013 is $115,970. As a developer, you are the creative mind behind software and applications we use today. Still, most developers do not become fully productive until 3-6 months into their tenure. Every day that you are not functioning at your full potential, you lose the opportunity to make an impact at your new job.

There are two key reasons why you are not productive on your first day of work.

You have to familiarize yourself with the codebase and spend the first few days checking out code and reading documentation

As a new employee you need to install all the different software packages required for your projects

The first is a necessary evil. Unfortunately, we cannot upload our collective knowledge to the cloud and share it with others and new employees have to catch up with their peers so they can work as a team. Great programmers are used to this, but it still takes time. There’s a lot written on how to successfully onboard a new developer. We like this discussion on The Business of Software.

But, if you need to focus on ramping up, why do you spend so much time on your first day configuring your development environments? Depending on your software stack and all the other services you use, your first day could mean four hours of installing frameworks, connecting to different services, setting up version control and registering for bug tracking software.

At Bowery, we recognized this is a huge problem and set out to fix it. Our goal is to make software developers more productive and we’re on our way starting at the top – when you first install the software needed to build your application. Bowery enables you to get your development environment up and running in less than 30 seconds.

Unless your company installs everything on your laptop before you get into the office, it’s likely you will spend 2-4 hours of your first day setting up your new laptop. What if you start a new side project? You’ll have to install everything manually. With the Bowery you can configure your operating system, install programming languages, web frameworks and the CMS of your choice, all in a few clicks.

Then all of your code is hosted on AWS. You can write code in the same text editor you love to use and then sync all changes to your AWS server. You can even execute commands directly to the server from the Bowery app. Once that image is set up you can share it with others so they can get up and running fast.

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